There has been quite a debate raging about the National Animal Identification System among farmers and ranchers. Ostensibly in the interest of disease control, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been pushing for improved tracking of animals. The program would require every location housing a single chicken, duck, turkey, cow, pig, goat, horse, or any

At a press conference Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff defended the negative effects to the U.S. meat industry of a Tuesday immigration raid in which over 1,200 suspected illegal immigrants working at meat packing company Swift & Co. were detained. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday raided six Swift meat processing plants across the

How much freedom, how much liberty, how much of America’s very soul, are you willing to give up to be secure? Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff says freedom should be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. He says that’s what you want. Liberty is an endangered species in the land which advanced the principle farther than

District Attorney Scott Storey of Jefferson County, Colorado is one busy lawman. The local housing market is chock full of mortgage fraud varmints. One particularly pesky ring, operating for roughly 5 years, recruited hundreds of illegal immigrants to act as “straw buyers,” the lowest players in the mortgage fraud game. Ringmasters were mortgage brokers, realtors,

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is one frustrated bureaucrat. You can hear it in his voice, even when you are only reading his words. The Department of Homeland Security is under fire from lawmakers and privacy advocates who are outraged at last month’s news of the Automated Targeting System, which assigns a terrorism risk

Homeland Stupidity has been nominated for an award in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Vote for Homeland Stupidity today! Apparently one of my faithful readers nominated Homeland Stupidity, because I certainly didn’t. Thank you, whoever you are! This is the fourth year for the Weblog Awards, which let people vote for the best blogs at the

A Congressional investigation found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid out an estimated $1 billion inappropriately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but to date have recovered less than one percent of the amount. Government Accountability Office investigators testified at a hearing Wednesday that in addition, FEMA is still sending out tens of millions of

The White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created to advise the President on privacy and civil liberties concerns in the war on terrorism, met in public for the first time Tuesday to hear from experts in the field. And did they get an earful. The largest criticisms of the board, which is appointed

The second worst nightmare of anyone who uses a computer to make a living is getting a repetitive stress injury. It inevitably leads to the worst nightmare of anyone who uses a computer to make a living: losing the ability to type entirely. The resourceful person then goes shopping for things like one-handed keyboards and

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian, who was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last October after he created a fake boarding pass generator, has gotten his computer equipment back, but remains under investigation by the Transportation Security Administration, which had ordered his Web site shut down. The order, delivered to Web hosting provider DreamHost, raises